Ukip gains Clacton whilst Labour holds Heywood and Middleton but only just!

I think she will re aquire Filipino Citizenship, but not immediately. We will wait till the Filipino (Roadshow) Outreach comes to the island again.

I really like the sound of the road show, very convenient indeed.

No problem:

The "Daily Mail".

I would not say "No problem".

If the Daily Mail printed "It's a nice sunny day in East Anglia" would you peer out of the window to check?!

I'm not so sure that a story published by the Daily Mail 80 years ago makes your point very successfully. You appear to be blaming the children for the sins of their parents - or in this case, their grandparents and great grandparents. Even more unfair as the racism is made not by the paper itself but by quoted reporting of a Magistrate in London. If you removed the quote marks from the headline then, yes, the paper could be accused of racist reportage. I don't see any racism in the story itself but I guess those who are ultra PC would demand that news reports contain no mention of nationality, colour, marital status, gender, sexual persuasion, stature, criminal history, political affiliations, disabilities, religion or any other collective PC proponents object to.

Why is it, do you think, that figures such as Jeremy Clarkson and Nigel Farage have such popular appeal? I would suggest that an increasing percentage of the population has "had it" with the relentless and increasing imposition of political correctness and Clarkson and Farage, who are both un-PC to a greater or lesser extent, are people with whom they can identify. More importantly, Farage is not a member of the political elite which only pays the barest hint of lip service to the electorate once every five years. With lies and broken promises being the common currency of the Westminster elite, the so-called major parties have for far too long played the electorate for fools with the result that more and more voters are saying "Enough is enough, we want real change". Like it or not, Farage and Ukip deliver on that - and importantly the electorate can see that. And, by the way, that was the vision of the "gang of four" - Jenkins, Rodgers, Owen and Williams.

An opinion poll published today by Survation, places support for Ukip at an all-time high of 25% - just 6% behind both Tory and Labour parties. Labour's support has dropped 3% since May, the Lib-Dems' dropped 2% from 10% but the Tories are up 3%. The greatest rise, 5%, is enjoyed by Ukip. According to John Curtice - who's the Professor of Politics at Strathclyde University and a regular on BBC Election Night marathons - this latest poll would give the Labour Party 253 MPs, the Conservatives 187, the Lib-Dems 11, Ukip 128 and some 71 independents/SNP/Ulster MPs. But on those figures, Miliband has no hope of becoming Prime Minister and even if Cameron and Farage were to do a deal, the Tory Toff would still need at least 11 others to join his "coalition".

Cameron is apparently running scared as well he might as he faces the real prospect of a vote of no confidence by his party which he may win but it will be very damaging to him. He is therefore throwing everything including the kitchen sink (and everything in it) at the Rochester By Election. The twerking bottoms at Central Office want to parachute James Cracknell into the constituency to fight Mark Reckless, its Ukip defector. Cracknell has long coveted a seat in the Commons (must be the expenses ) and applied unsuccessfully to be the Tory candidate for Uxbridge and South Ruislip but the party preferred Boris Johnson. Apart from campaigning against a change to Alternative Voting in 2011, Cracknell's only other foray into the world of politics was in 2014 when he announced he would stand for election to the European Parliament to represent the Southwest England and Gibraltar constituency. But he failed to get elected. He did train as a geography teacher so he should be able to find Rochester.

I'm informed that Tory Ministers have been ordered to schedule at least six visits each to the Rochester constituency. The government has not set the date for this By Election as yet leading to suspicion that it is delaying the plebiscite for as long as it can so that Reckless runs out of campaigning funds - and steam.

The Sunday Times is reporting that a Labour MP telephoned Carswell shortly after he was declared elected and they had a conversation about him defecting to Ukip. Meanwhile Miliband is apparently set to announce that he will introduce the requirement that migrants coming to this country can speak and understand English. That's been mooted before by the present government and the EU made it very clear on that occasion that such a restriction would contrary to the principles of freedom of movement and could not be introduced. But I'm sure Miliband already knew that but hopes that electorate doesn't or has forgotten.

My only knowledge of the subject comes from the shipping aspects of the import of biomass for burning in UK power stations, which I am slightly involved with. So far as I can see, Drax is in line with other UK coal fired power stations, and as OSS says, the fiscal benefits pre-date the current government.

I answered Markham's possibly rhetorical question at the start of this thread. The causes are economic, and have nothing to do with "The EU", or "Immigration" or "mainstream politicians not talking straight". The majority of people are becoming worse off, because of the effects on employment of the "third industrial revolution", as The Economist calls it, and they quite understandably don't like it.

As I wrote earlier:

"There's endless talk about "disengagement" and "disillusionment with mainstream politicians", but I frankly can't see how the pretty piffling expenses scandals can explain this sort of result. I think it's simpler: it's the economy, stupid. Specifically, two things have come together. The working class, already battered by deindustrialisation, have been received another hammer blow as medium-skilled jobs have disappeared, taking away their ladder upwards out of dead-end jobs. Large swathes of the middle classes are just as fed up, for the same reason - they're being forced down into unskilled work. Median wages have stagnated - the average voter doesn't see much improvement in his or her prospects.

"No one really has an answer to any of this, so there aren't any clear policy proposals which voters can latch onto. Therefore, the frustration it causes is being expressed in all kinds of other forms that UKIP is exploiting: anti-immigrant sentiment, anti-EU sentiment, nostalgia, a general sense that "everything is going down the drain", etc. To me, this is only explanation that makes sense. The actual day-to-day level of irritation to the man in the street caused by Polish plumbers or EU directives cannot possibly give rise to this.

"This would also explain the apparent conundrum, observed by the Economist, that although plenty of voters moan about immigrants, mainstream parties who pander to that particular concern don't actually seem to gain much from it. Much the same could be said for Europe. If the real worries are elsewhere, the parties are looking in the wrong place.

Large parts of the working class may now be so disconnected from the notion of education as a means of self-improvement (because they have no experience of it as such) that no government policy can pacify them. But at the very least, there ought to be some new thinking about education and training that offers some hope of advancement to the massed ranks of the middle class who are watching their jobs being consumed by technology."

Sorry, Andrew, I don't buy "it's the economy, stupid" as being the sole reason for the electorate's disquiet. The economy - and not the true major issues of (im)migration and the EU - is the only reason that's acceptable to the political elite because it gives them something convenient to hide behind when things go awry as Britain's economy is also influenced by events abroad. In reality the hottest topics for Britain's electorate is (im)migration followed by the EU. The EU has long been an issue since the early Thatcher years whilst (im)migration really started to become an issue in late 2003 and early 2004 and has dominated the electorate's thoughts ever since.